With nine weeks until the midterms, here’s the bottom line from our team at Protect Democracy: everyone can and should participate in our democracy this fall with confidence.
That’s not to ignore how acute and alarming the dangers are. But we have an extensive toolkit, a track record to back it up, and our ecosystem is prepared and well-coordinated. We’ve survived assaults on our elections before and we’re going to do it again.
When read individually, the eight threats below can feel overwhelming. But when we understand them as part of the Deceive, Disrupt, Deny playbook, we can channel our energy into deploying a stronger playbook of our own. That’s why our team is partnering with organizations across the ideological spectrum and key sectors — labor, faith, business, public health, Gen Z, national security — to prepare their members to respond to each of the threats below. We’re also utilizing our own communications strategy for reaching and educating voters, including on the digital platforms where most Americans now get their news, so that all of us recognize the election interference playbook and understand how we can respond.
Read on for a closer look at the scenarios we’re preparing for and why we’re confident that our movement will rise to the challenge. Of course, this isn’t everything that our 125+ experts are working on — and it’s a tiny portion of what all of us, the pro-democracy majority in this country, are doing together.
Threat one: The Justice Department may attempt to seize ballots and voting machines
Starting in January, when the FBI relied on baseless claims of fraud in 2020 to raid an election center in Fulton County, Georgia, the Trump administration has laid the groundwork to try to disrupt the election by seizing materials or otherwise messing with election administration.
We’ve seen equally worrisome investigative actions in Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin, and California. As our friends at Just Security put it: “For the first time, the country faces the possibility that the DOJ may attempt to take over polling places, seize ballots during an election, or threaten to prosecute voters or election officials to interfere in the administration of an election.”
How we’re responding: Since an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, Protect Democracy and our peers are producing materials for the judges who evaluate these seizure warrants to raise the odds that they reject deficient and politically motivated applications.
And if seizures do happen, we’re making sure election officials have the protocols and resources in place to minimize harm to election operations and vote counting. With the Brennan Center, we’ve published and widely distributed guidance on lining up counsel before the pressure hits, maintaining redundancies of records, documenting everything if federal officers show up, and being prepared to file for emergency relief. This includes state-specific guides we’re producing to help officials create personalized plans of action.
We’re also coordinating with national peers as well as state and local organizations to ensure that, if election officials or other actors need to file emergency litigation to halt blatantly illegal attempts to seize election materials or interfere with election administration, they have the support to do so rapidly and forcefully.
Threat two: The president is actively seeking to seize state voter files and impose barriers to the ballot
The president is pursuing a sweeping campaign to try to seize control of who gets to vote and how. Trump has issued executive orders requiring documentary proof of citizenship on federal registration forms and directing DHS to dictate to USPS which voters can receive a mail ballot. The Justice Department has demanded that every state hand over its complete voter rolls — data which could be used to force purges based on bad matches and manufacture doubt about results. DHS and FEMA are attempting to condition billions in counterterrorism funding on states turning over that same data. DHS is also invading the privacy of millions of Americans to assemble and compile a massive, inaccurate master “citizen list” which it now plans to pressure election officials to compare against state voter rolls. And the administration has renewed its push for the SAVE America Act, which would require documentary proof of citizenship nationwide (but which fortunately does not have the votes to pass the Senate).
How we’re responding: Our ecosystem is making good progress already. First, pro-democracy actors have blocked core provisions of both of Trump’s anti-voting executive orders (and as we explained here, the Supreme Court USPS ruling is almost certainly noise, not substance). Second, the Justice Department is 0-23 in its lawsuits against states that have refused to hand over their voter rolls; Protect Democracy also filed a lawsuit against the Justice Department with co-counsel at the ACLU, ACLU-D.C., Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, and the Democracy and Rule of Law Clinic at Harvard Law School to block the Justice Department’s illegal attempts to compile a national voter database. Third, a coalition of state Attorneys General sued to block DHS and FEMA from conditioning counterterrorism funding on states adopting federally dictated election administration conditions; and with the Jacobson Lawyers Group, Brennan Center, and Public Rights Project, Protect Democracy just filed a related lawsuit against DHS to ensure the relief applies to as many jurisdictions as possible. Fourth, along with Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington and The Electronic Privacy Information Center, Protect Democracy just filed a lawsuit to prevent the administration from pressuring states to make last-minute changes to their voter rolls based on DHS’ erroneous master “citizen list.”
Threat three: ICE/DHS deployments may seek to intimidate or suppress voters
Administration actors and allies have long hinted at DHS/ICE presence during the midterms. Steve Bannon called ICE deployment to airports a “test run.” Former White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said that she “can’t guarantee that an ICE agent won’t be around a polling location in November,” and Attorney General Todd Blanche publicly asked, “Why is there objection to sending ICE officers to polling places?”
Blanche later refused to explicitly rule out deployments at poll sites. Meanwhile, when the DNC sued for records of any plans to deploy agents to polls, ICE told a judge no records exist — and then reversed course and admitted to having more than 11,000 potentially relevant pages; CBP found nearly 117,000. Bottom line, we have to prepare for ICE/DHS to be used as a tool for election interference, whether through deployment at polling places, or more likely, through surges of federal presence in competitive districts under the pretext of routine immigration enforcement.
How we’re responding: Here, both litigation and legislation are potentially effective.
On the legal front, we’re preparing for emergency litigation if federal agents are deployed in ways that intimidate voters or suppress participation. We are ready to seek emergency relief and can build on our work in Arizona in 2022, when we persuaded a Trump-appointed judge to strictly limit armed vigilantes’ behavior at ballot drop boxes.
Meanwhile, on the legislative front, five states have passed legislation based on a model bill that our team crafted to let people sue federal officials who violate their constitutional rights — with California the most recent to cross the finish line on August 27th. Once the California bill is signed by the Governor, more than 70 million Americans will live in a state with this kind of legal protection. As voting begins, these laws can be used to challenge actions that deprive people of the right to vote, including intimidation and violence at poll sites. Agents who know their actions carry personal liability are also less likely to commit abuses.
Threat four: Surveillance and policing by ICE and DHS may put a chill on First Amendment activity
Surveillance, intimidation, and overzealous law enforcement have the potential to chill Americans’ exercise of their rights to protest and observe government action.
Consider a growing trend: an investigation by ProPublica and PBS identified more than 300 people arrested at anti-ICE protests and charged with crimes like assaulting or interfering with federal agents — and found that more than a third of those cases have collapsed, either through acquittals or dropped charges once officers’ claims didn’t hold up.
Our team spoke to NPR in a similar piece about the free speech and First Amendment implications of how the Justice Department is weaponizing criminal conspiracy charges against protesters. In addition, The Wall Street Journal has reported on how ICE has built a $258 million surveillance operation scanning over 200 websites for critical speech and issuing hundreds of subpoenas to de-anonymize posters.
How we’re responding: We’re working to rein in the government’s surveillance and intimidation tactics through litigation and legal advocacy.
In February, we sued DHS on behalf of Maine residents who were told they were being added to “domestic terrorist” watchlists for lawfully filming ICE operations.
At a March hearing, the government’s lawyer couldn’t tell the judge what the government is doing with our clients’ personal information, including where it’s being kept and how it’s being used. As Time Magazine wrote, the case gets at a question “never supposed to be this difficult to answer: how is the government treating ordinary citizens with whom it disagrees?”
Meanwhile, we just filed a brief from prominent First Amendment and rule of law organizations — including the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, Society for the Rule of Law, and the Cato Institute — in a criminal conspiracy case against Minnesota activists. The brief urges the court to order the government to turn over documents that could demonstrate political motivation behind the prosecution; it also criticizes the government’s surveillance tactics and argues that the scale of this assault on free expression has “not been seen since the Second Red Scare.”
As the government’s data-gathering against critics and observers expands, this work can help keep it in check. And in addition to the privacy of our data, we’re also working to uphold the privacy and sanctity of our homes. In April, we brought a lawsuit against DHS to strike down the agency’s warrantless home entry policy, under which armed, masked agents are entering and searching homes without a judge’s permission.
In each of these cases, we can build precedent to constrain lawless behavior and deter similar election-related overreach.
Threat five: Government sources are working to corrupt the information ecosystem and seed propaganda
This is two threats in one. Our colleague Rachel Goodman summed up the first:
Trump FCC Chair Brendan Carr has wielded “public interest” to threaten and investigate broadcasters for speech as core to the First Amendment as editing an interview with then-presidential candidate Kamala Harris; reporting on local ICE operations; covering the Iran war in ways that the President dislikes; and continuing to air Jimmy Kimmel’s comedy in the face of White House opposition… And Carr’s threats run not only to broadcast licensees, but to the media companies that own and operate them…
The second threat centers on whether the federal government has used public money to produce and distribute favorable content about its own immigration operations, and whether it has granted access to commentators who cover it favorably while excluding independent journalists. For instance, in Portland, Oregon, the government has not disputed deploying chemical munitions in a way connected to creating content, including staged video, to support a false narrative about the city. Elsewhere, agencies have invited favorable commentators on immigration ride-alongs and into facilities while turning away reporters who requested the same access.
How we’re responding: On the first front, in July, we brought a filing from a bipartisan coalition of former FCC officials opposing FCC Chair Brendan Carr’s latest effort to revoke the licenses of broadcasters whose speech the Trump administration dislikes — in this case, ABC. We brought a similar filing in 2025 in connection with the FCC’s highly unusual proceedings against CBS. Our latest filing received widespread coverage, including from unlikely validators like Newsmax.
We also recently won a preliminary injunction in our lawsuit against a Trump administration immigration policy that targets tech researchers, content moderators, and trust-and-safety professionals whose work counters election misinformation.
On the second front, we’re working to force the release of the information we need to know whether the federal government used public money or special access to create favorable coverage of its immigration operations. As our colleague Katie Schwartzmann put it:
“Americans have a right to know whether our tax dollars are funding a propaganda effort — one that distorts the news, pumps out flattering coverage, and freezes out reporters who would scrutinize the Administration’s narratives.”
In response, Protect Democracy filed Freedom of Information Act requests seeking relevant records from ICE, CBP, and DHS. The government failed to comply with our requests by the deadline set by law, so we brought a lawsuit asking a court to compel disclosure of the requested records.
Threat six: State officials are likely to face pressure to subvert the certification process
Election certification is a mandatory duty for the officials involved — and one that they have no option to refuse. But local and state officials are increasingly facing intense pressure to withhold their signatures until conspiracy theories are “investigated” or results are overturned.
There’s the infamous example from 2020, when President Trump asked Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find 11,780 votes.” Days earlier, Trump had personally pressured two Wayne County, Michigan canvassers not to certify results showing he’d lost the county. By our count, at least 21 counties in eight states have seen attempts to refuse to certify since 2020; we know that the certification process is a likely target, especially since many of the officials who have upheld their oath in prior cycles have been replaced with more pliable actors.
How we’re responding: We’ve built and refined an effective certification protection strategy in past cycles. Our in-state advocates have built strong bipartisan working relationships with election officials in key states, which allow us to share resources like these explainers with these actors to reaffirm their constitutional requirements.
Recognizing that these officials are facing tremendous pressure, we’ve also mobilized public and private support — for instance, by running radio and TV campaigns in their districts explaining that certification is mandatory, and by organizing outreach from influential community members like business executives and faith leaders to provide them with direct encouragement to hold the line.
Lastly, if needed, we can apply counterpressure, for instance by ensuring that state officials are prepared to seek court orders to force local bodies to certify, and by contributing to media coverage that deters officials from abuses by reminding them that they could face criminal liability for failing to follow the process.
Threat seven: Litigation may seek to change the rules of the game and/or flip the results
Election deniers have developed a specific playbook for this: the “zombie lawsuit.”
These are cases filed prior to the election, not with the goal of winning beforehand, but instead with the intention of planting a complaint that “rises from the dead” so that a court or Congress has a pretext to overturn results if the litigants’ preferred candidate loses.
In 2024, we tracked dozens of these across swing states, including suits attempting to disqualify military and overseas voters’ ballots in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and North Carolina, and challenges to routine voter list maintenance in Nevada, Arizona, and Wisconsin. All of them failed, but we can nevertheless expect to see these kinds of claims rise from the dead (again) this fall.
How we’re responding: The good news is that we’ve defeated this threat before. Consider the most serious of the post-2024 zombie lawsuits: in North Carolina, Justice Alison Riggs won her Supreme Court race against Judge Jefferson Griffin by 734 votes, which was confirmed by two recounts. Griffin then tried to throw out roughly 65,000 votes and the state Supreme Court initially sided with him.
We used a broad toolkit in response. Our in-house data experts helped identify voters who lawfully cast their ballots and were at risk, including many who voted for Griffin. We worked with partner organizations to place these voters’ stories in coverage across the state. We also helped organize a rebuke from 200+ former Republican elected officials and conservative members of the bench and bar. Lastly, after the state Supreme Court issued its opinion in Griffin’s favor, we filed a class-action lawsuit of impacted voters in federal court.
In May 2025, a Trump-appointed federal judge ordered the state Board of Elections to certify the actual result. Griffin then conceded the race. We’re prepared for this kind of post-election litigation in key states this cycle, building on what we learned from this win.
Threat eight: Members of Congress could try to refuse to seat the duly elected winners in January
As Molly Roberts and Lawfare explained here, the process for seating members of Congress could become a target for bad actors seeking to override the rightful results.
It’s a remote possibility, but the stakes are high, so we have been preparing for scenarios where duly elected candidates could be denied their seats. This could play out in a number of ways: bad actors trying to manipulate the roll of members allowed onto the floor during the seating process; members-elect exploiting a tradition that allows any member to object to another’s swearing-in; and state-level certification delays or false certificates that muddy who the “rightful” winner is. As an example, Senator Tommy Tuberville has already previewed the kind of baseless claims that could fuel these tactics, saying without evidence that “We probably have four or five senators that didn’t legally win. They shouldn’t be up here.”
How we’re responding: It’s first worth noting how exceptionally difficult it would be for bad actors to pull this off. As Prof. Derek Muller explains on the Election Law Blog:
In short, most scenarios get basic facts or law wrong, and the most complicated scenarios require a unique convergence of factors that have never existed, a unique level of coordination that seems very unlikely, docile political opposition, and a judiciary willing to acquiesce to all these moves–and all working simultaneously. Even then, most of these scenarios could, at most, delay some organization of the House by a matter of hours or days.
That said, there are congressional, legal, and public readiness strategies we’re deploying. We’re in the weeds of the state-by-state and procedural vulnerabilities and solutions, including working with right-of-center partners to ensure that enough House Republicans are ready and willing to oppose any attempt to manipulate seating.
We’re also working with partners to train congressional staff on vulnerabilities and procedural steps for resolving election disputes. And, as reported by NPR, Politico, and The Guardian, we’re helping key members, including Democratic leadership, prepare decisive responses to various potential crises well before any of them could play out.
Lastly, on the public readiness front, we’re helping assemble the broad, cross-sector relationships to mobilize a rapid response should there be a credible attempt to overturn the results.
Bonus threat: President Trump could invoke emergency powers, the Insurrection Act, or some other pretext to interfere with voting and election administration
Trump has several tools he could reach for — he could declare a national emergency, which unlocks a sprawling set of statutory powers; he could invoke the Insurrection Act, which allows military deployment for domestic law enforcement; or he could try to federalize the National Guard through other statutory authority. Even a legally doomed attempt at using any of these could do damage before a court steps in, by creating chaos and confusion, intimidating voters, and handing Trump a story to tell about how he tried to secure elections and the courts undermined him.
How we’re responding: The good news is that as scary as they sound, these scenarios are a bit of a red herring.
None of these paths actually get Trump what he would need to interfere with voting and election administration. Congress gave control of elections to the states, and no emergency declaration or statutory invocation changes that — or converts otherwise illegal actions into legitimate ones.
We’ve already seen how this plays out in practice: throughout 2025 and into 2026, courts blocked Trump’s attempts to federalize and deploy the National Guard into several cities. (Protect Democracy filed briefs repeatedly on behalf of former senior military leaders explaining that these deployments are dangerous and illegal.) In short, this is mostly about optics and political theater; in 2025, Trump declared more national emergencies in his first 100 days than any president managed in a full year, but this hasn’t changed who actually runs elections or how courts have ruled when he’s tried to stretch these authorities past their limits.
Combine that with his public unpopularity and polling data that shows domestic deployments are deeply unpopular, and any attempt along these lines seems more likely to backfire than to provide him any meaningful gains.
So what does this all mean for November?
The threats are real and alarming, but we should be confident in our collective ability to participate freely and fairly in our democracy this fall.
That word — participate — is the key one. Collective action is the only way out. Thousands, if not millions, of Americans are hard at work in ways big and small to defend the midterms.
We all have a role to play in upholding the foundations of our democracy.
If you’re wondering how to get involved, what more you can be doing personally, and which actions you can encourage your friends and families to take, we’ve got you covered. This playbook is updated weekly: How you can protect democracy.
We all need to do our part — not just by taking all the actions on this page, but also by sharing them with our communities.
Together, we can ensure that our movement for freedom and democracy prevails.
